Boy to Man

The following excerpts are from my father’s forthcoming web autobiography. An aware London boy in 1939 playing in the streets of Hampstead and Kilburn, going on to work in Fleet Street after the WW2. He now lives in retirement in West Sussex, by the sea. Enjoy.

The King and Queen, George VI and Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, went on a short visit to North America with a view to strengthening Anglo-Saxon solidarity, and I have a clear memory of our mothers coming to school on a beautiful, sunny May afternoon and taking Percy and me to join the huge crowds in The Mall to greet their majesties’ homecoming as they drove in an open carriage to Buckingham Palace. Quite improper behaviour for mothers, and headmaster Mr Pettit looked rather miffed, but wisely he let us go.

It was a time for patriotism, people pulling together as the months of 1939 went by. Air raid shelters were being built in streets, one I particularly remember in Ulysses Road outside Arthur Searle’s house, a brick built thing which would give some safety to passers by caught in an air raid. The Anderson shelters were allocated to people with gardens, corrugated iron sections bolted together and half sunk into the earth. We had ours at the end Mr Fudge’s garden for use by all members of the household, and a gang of workmen arrived, dug the hole, bolted the sections together, and were away to next door in a trice. All rather exciting to an 11-year-old.

Air raid sirens appeared in many roads, tall steel pipes with the siren a-top, and I volunteered to help fill sandbags, and stack them as blast shelter around the doors of the air raid wardens local HQ in Fortune Green Road. Everyone was doing his bit.

On September 1st the German army moved into Poland. The nation waited. Two days later we gathered around the wireless as people were all over the country, all over Europe.

I remember it well, that sunny, autumn morning. Suddenly the air raid sirens began sounding their awful, soon to become familiar, wail. Looking down from our first floor window onto the street outside we saw, my mother and I, a frightening sight. The lady next door, wife of a naval reserve officer recalled recently to his ship, was running around in the road in circles, screaming hysterically. A neighbour gathered her in her arms, quietening her. One person’s reaction I witnessed on the day war broke out. They were patriotic people, I suppose, flew the White Ensign of the Royal Navy from a flagpole in the garden.

And so to the war, my war, World War II. People had expected that bombing raids would follow the sound of that first siren, but in fact nothing actually happened, and a period began of what came to be called the Phoney War. Many thousands of children had been evacuated from the towns and cities to live with people n the safety of the countryside, Ray among them, but my parents considered that their gentle boy had best stay in London with them, and accept what the risks might be. They were right, I’m sure. I was a home boy, a mother’s and father’s boy, and would have been unhappy billeted with strangers. As many were.

Percy and I were scholarship boys, having passed the 11-plus exams, and so had the choice of going to one of two Central schools, Haverstock, or Fleet. We were introduced to both headmasters, and the Fleet one looked the nicer, so we both opted for entry to Fleet Central School.

Both schools were destroyed in the bombing, so we had no school to attend anyway, and with so many children gone in the evacuation there was a halt in education. Home classes were organised for classes of six or eight children, whatever space a mother could find around her dining table, and we had gentle, kindly Mr Davis come to our house, one of our popular Beckford teachers.

But for most of that early part of the war us boys were free, free to run and play on Fortune Green, or a mile or so up to wonderful Hampstead Heath. The streets of houses, homes of the wealthy, a largely Jewish area, were deserted, the occupants having fled to safety, many to the States, it was said, but soon the army arrived, and commandeered these houses for billets, the roads chocablock with camouflaged lorries

Percy and I had jobs, as newspaper boys, morning, evening, Sunday deliveries, and regular Saturday jobs, myself a butcher boy for Seabrooks in Fortune Green Road, and Percy for Mr Davis at the nearby oilshop, which meant me delivering meat about Hampstead on a trade bicycle with large basket in the front carrier., and Percy doing likewise with his basket delivering such items as bundles of firewood. The payment for such work was of the order of half-a-crown, 2s6d., or 12p now, for a full morning’s Seabrook work, and similarly, I guess, for newspaper rounds, or helping the milk roundsman, an occasional Saturday job. I was always a good money manager, throughout my life, still am.

But I do remember us, Percy and me, being swindled on one occasion, by a milkman who, after some considerable time doing much of the running up many flights of mansion stairs with the milk bottles, giving us a penny ha’penny between us, three farthings each ! The word went round the paperboys. That milkman found it very hard to get boy help after that. The mean man had many flights of stairs ahead of him to climb alone.

There were a lot of mansion blocks around our parts of Hampstead, and one task which intrigued me was a block down by West End Green, smart at the front of the building but at the rear dreary. There were iron whistle pipes for each flat at delivery boy ground level and rope pulleys for the lift, a simple large timber box, no front of back to it. You blew in the pipe, first putting your blue-striped butcher boy overall over the mouthpiece to avoid getting a mouthful of falling rust, and the lady would stick her head out of the kitchen window four or five floors up.
“All right, lovey, just put it in the lift.” So one put the wrapped joint of meat, sausages, (sometimes slices of corned beef, according to the availability of the meat ration being distributed by the Ministry of Food that week) on the wooden floor of the box lift
and hauled on the rope. And up it went to the waiting lady. It was quite an easy haul, and I always found this delivery quite fun..

Passing our 11-plus, being scholarship boys, opting for a school obliterated by the Luftwaffe, the government soon got organised and we were sent to a school in Kilburn, the Harben, which was termed a senior school — for those who had failed the 11-plus. This was a set-back, we regareded as a downgrading, but there was now no choice, so to Kilburn we went. On our bicycles. I should say that our bicycles had been bought for us by our parents second hand.
I never knew any boy who had a brand new cycle, except Derek Fudge, the landlord’s son downstairs. And his father owned a number of bicycle shops.

In war time there were fewer vehicles on the road, so cycling the couple of miles to the Harben was no difficulty, and all English schoolboys in those days looked out for shrapnel lying in the street, jagged metal fragments from the previous night’s anti-aircraft fire at the German bombers. Everyone had his shrapnel collection. We knew these times as ‘the Blitz’ coined from a German word ‘Blitzkrieg’, their word for all-out attack on their enemies by ground troops and warplanes. So blitz wasn’t actually the proper word for us in London when it was being bombed. Nevertheless, this was The Blitz.

How long we attended Harben I don’t know,, but the government re-organised once more, and we were re-routed to Haverstock Central school, only now it had taken over the premises Princes Road School, further into London town, and hard by Regents Park. Bicycles, of course, but no going home for lunch now. Our lunch times were often spent in a Regents Park playground.

Air raids happened most often at night, and with my parents I would go down the garden to the Anderson shelter, together with other residents of the house. The shelters were improved, by the government, the earth floor being covered with concrete. Necessity being the mother of invention our shelter was soon made into a quite comfortable little nest, carpeting found, lighting, furniture, bedding. Evenings, nights in the shelter while the raids took place became rather enjoyable, as far as I was concerned. England was up against it, under real threat, those in the garden shelter became friends, comrades. It was our club. Everyone knew that unless a bomb fell right on top of the Anderson you wouldn’t be killed. Your house and everything in it might be gone in the air raid. But you’d be alive. As a child I always slept well, through the noisiest bombing. I still sleep well, head down, zonk. One morning after a raid, a house in Ulysses Road, not a hundred yards away, was gone, and with it a school friend, Billy Young. And all his family.

Everyone in the land had a gas mask, issued in a neat cardboard box, a string around your neck with which to carry it. Everywhere. Mothers soon made attractive covers for the boxes.
There were even gas masks for babies, all-enclosing garments with the child safe inside.. Arthur Searle’s father had been gassed in WWI, and gasped for breath ever after. Mercifully neither side used gas on the enemy.

The first German bomb of the war fell in the Shetlands. A rabbit was found dead at the spot. A quick-witted songwriter seized the mocking newspaper headline, and the popular song ‘Run Rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run…’was born . But there’s nothing funny about air raids As a child I was never frightened in the war, which I believe was quite common. Parents are worried. But the wartime spirit prevailed. We were one people, and in May 1940 Mr Chamberlain stood down, and a National Government was formed under Winston Churchill. If ever there was the right man for the job it was Winston. He offered “Blood, toil, tears and sweat”, And England knew she had a Leader. Labour’s leader Clement Attlee, was deputy p.m.

The Belgians were collapsing before the Wehrmacht and our army, encircled, retreated to Dunkirk, where the famous evacuation took place. Over a week (May 17 to June 4th) more than 300,000 of our men were taken home by 300 warships and 400 small civilian craft, ‘the little ships.’ The Royal Sovereign, somehow a favourite of mine, and I always look for her, what remains of her really, the mast and some superstructure, stands off Eastbourne still, a lightship. The little ships remain forever dear to England’s heart, a reminder of the dark days.

That day, June 4, Churchill gave his famous speech … “We shall fight them on the beaches … we shall never surrender!” How right he was, feeling for the spirit of England.

Hitler declared war of total annihilation on us, and Italy declared war on us and France as well.. Mussolini’s great opportunity, he thought, for a share of the spoils. The battle of the Atlantic began in August, the blockade of our merchant ships by Germany’s submarine fleet, and in the skies the Royal Air Force fought Herman Goering’s Luftwaffe bombers.

One year after Chamberlain’s September broadcast my country was taking a terrible pounding, and that month saw the heaviest raid on London, which, of course, was my family’s immediate concern. London’s burning, London’s burning, St Paul’s, the Guildhall, eight of the City’s lovely Wren churches, including the one which was to become mine, St Bride’s, Fleet Street. London, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, all our cities bombed; thousands of our people dead. But as 1940 drew to its close we knew that the RAF had won the Battle of Britain. And because Germany had been unable to gain air supremacy they had lost their ability to invade these islands. It was a turning point in the war.

Before war was declared in September ’39 Germany started, secretly to position units of her fleet, U-boats, ‘pocket battleships’, and supply vessels out in the vastness of the Atlantic across which our food would have to be brought by the Merchant Navy. I shall write something of this now.

The Admiral Graf Spee was one such, stationed in the south Atlantic, raiding our shipping. Her skipper, Captain Langsdorf, was a gentleman of the old school, who arrested a vessel, took off the personnel, then sank their ship. In 1939 there was no way of finding this enemy warship, which put much of Britain’s supplies to the bottom of the Atlantic, except by the SOS signals of the victims when they saw Graf Spee approach. And by the time the Royal Navy arrived in the vicinity the German had gone. She had to be re-fuelled, of course, and this was done by arranged rendezvous with her supply ship Altmark. At the same time Langsdorf had his prisoners transferred to Altmark, to be taken as PoWs to Germany.

A naval squadron of three cruisers, Ajax, Achilles and Exeter found the battleship, and although outgunned by her they damaged the German so severely that she was forced to retreat to the harbour at Montevideo in neutral Uruguay. The rules of war meant that she could only remain there for a limited number of days. Langsdorf knew that his ship was so severely crippled that he couldn’t sail out and fight the British. His crew left the ship, and Graf Spee was scuttled, Langsdorf committing suicide. A great victory for us in those early days of the war, and there was national rejoicing. But among Langsdorf’s prisoners there was sadness when they learned of his death, for he was respected, that German officer, having treated them with scrupulous fairness, even friendliness.

The high regard in which he was held was common knowledge, and I was to have this confirmed to me personally years later by one of the principal actors in the drama which followed soon after the Battle of the River Plate.

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was understandably elated at the Montevideo victory. But what about the prisoners? It was thought that a number of them were aboard the supply ship Altmark, which was now spotted heading for neutral Norway. She took shelter in Josing fjord, so, legally-speaking, out of bounds to the navy. Winston wasn’t a man to heed such niceties. “Go in and apprehend the German” he signalled to Captain Vian, commander of the destroyer HMS Cossack. “And if our chaps are imprisoned on her, get them out. And bring them home!”

Vian took his ship into the blackness of the fjord, a hawser was thrown aboard Altmark to secure her, and a boarding party leaped onto her deck, led by Lt Cdr Bradwell Turner, revolver in hand, his men carrying small arms. And cutlasses! Fierce hand-to-hand combat, six German sailors killed, and the ship was taken.

Hatch covers were wrenched up, and Turner peered down into the hold. “Any British down there ?” “Yes” came the cry from below. “We’re all British!” “Then come on up, Gentlemen —the Navy’s here!” And up they came, 299 British seamen, no longer prisoners, and homeward bound.

That cry: The Navy’s here! echoed in newspaper headlines all over the world. Britain rejoiced.

The Haverstock Central School, then operating from premises near to Regents Park, didn’t seem to suit me, my parents thought, and for reasons I shall not now know they had me moved to the local branch of Pitman’s College on Shoot Up Hill, a private establishment, and fee-paying. My subjects were English and French — and shorthand and typing ! Ill fortune lurked for any school Ronnie attended, and the college’s ancient building, a one-time bishop’s palace, was gutted by the Luftwaffe’s incendiary bombs. We students turned up for class one morning (not a mile from my home) to find a smouldering ruin, the teachers sending us off with messages for our parents. Something would be done. And I have a vivid memory of an incendiary bomb embedded halfway into a pavement slab it’s tail fin neatly sticking up, the pavement white-scorched around it. It surprised me that a paving slab could burn.

A lot of things were burning at that time. The Dunkirk evacuation of our army had succeeded in June so we were out of mainland Europe, with the Germans in possession of virtually all our ammunition and equipment. Now, that summer of 1940 Britain really stood alone. And Battle commenced. The Battle of Britain, the Royal Air Force against Goering’s Luftwaffe .

Lord Beaverbrook, Canadian-born owner of Express newspapers, and later to become my boss, was appointed Minister of Aircraft Production by Churchill (who, many years later, on his death, referred to him as ‘my greatest friend.’) Beaverbrook was a Get-Things-Done man with the power and influence and sheer drive to make the factories work as never before producing Spitfires, and Hurricanes. His son, Max Aitken, was one of the Few, who fought in them over our skies, alongside my friends Douglas Bader and Archie Winskill. And they won. In September it was finished, and later, historians came to marvel that, after Dunkirk, Hitler had not invaded England across the Channel when, with the British army in chaos, he might well have succeeded As Archie told me: “If we had lost control of the skies in 1940 this country would have been wide open to German invasion.”

In September the Blitz began in earnest, Coventry suffered its greatest air raid with a thousand people killed; London was bombed, with the other cities, and the incendiaries I’ve mentioned rained down on us. Air raid wardens learned how to deal with these flaming bombs with stirrup pumps, and we all were taught such defence methods.

On March 27 1945 a young married lady, Ivy Millichamp, aged 34. was in her kitchen at 88 Kynaston Road, Orpington when the V2 landed. Poor Ivy was dead when her husband dragged her from the wreckage of their home. The bomb crater was 40ft across, 20ft deep. She was laid to rest at All Saints churchyard. Her headstone there records that she was: “The Last Person in Britain to be killed by Enemy Action.”

By this time Germany was collapsing, and the rocket team, having killed Ivy with their parting shot, packed up and left their platform base in Holland. The American army were quickly there, and realising that all this rocketry equipment must not be simply destroyed, arranged for all the essentials to be shipped off to the United States, where Professor von Braun was soon heading up America’s rocket programme, and, of course, became a citizen of the USA.

He was questioned by reporters about the morality of his work, which had killed, indiscriminately, some 3,000 people in England, but shrugged off all responsibility. He was a scientist, not a politician, after all. Which produced a jingle in the newspapers:

The rockets go up.
Where do they come down?
‘That’s not my department’
says Werner von Braun

But both sides bombed the enemy, and the RAF had devastated, among other German cities, Dresden, where 100,000 poor people died in the firestorm created there, in February 1945 Head of Bomber Command was Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris, and much criticism was directed at him for the Dresden raid. Not from me. Our task was to beat the Germans as they tried to beat us, as, later that year, when we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. A terrible act . But Hiroshima, like Dresden, was a price the enemy had to pay.

1945 August, 6th and 9th Hiroshima, Nagasaki atomised. The war really was over. To everyone’s surprise, I believe. Japan surrendering ! But we had the Bomb, the uranium one called ‘Little Boy’ by the Americans on Hiroshima, and ‘Fat Man’, a plutonium weapon, on Nagasaki. Quoting Leonard Cheshire V.C. “It was right to drop the bomb”.

The German war had ended in May, with Churchill at No. 10, but at the general election in July the Labour party swept to power with a large majority of 173 seats, and Clement Attlee, the wartime deputy, now Prime Minister Wisely the new government didn’t release all the men from the armed services, but went on calling up people, myself included, although there was no enemy left to fight. I say wisely, although I didn’t think it at the time, but wisely because it prevented thousands and thousands of men descending on civvy street before there were jobs for them in this new time of peace. And this measured release resulted in there being no real unemployment as the wheels of industry began to turn from war production to peace productiion.

On a cold November day my father put me on a train for the North country, and Padgate, the RAF induction centre. I had no experience, of course, of this raw life, billets of 40 men in nissen huts, all swearing; issued with a canvas kitbag and complete uniform of thick air force blue cloth.

After being knocked into shape by basic training and various RAF postings in the north of England and Scotland I found myself representing my section in the boxing ring! When the flight sergeant was looking for a sturdy middle-weight I thought, because I wore spectacles, that I wouldn’t be given the honour. “Well, you can take ‘em off before you get in the ring, Airman!” glowered the kindly flight sergeant, a red-faced member of the RAF Regiment.

So gloved up in gym kit I embarked on my fighting career. Another nervous lad, my opponent, was in the other corner. As we were prepared by our seconds he smiled across at me, shrugging his shoulders. “Now he knows about as much as you do about boxing,” said my red-faced sergeant, “so when the bell goes don’t bugger about. Walk straight up to him and hit him straight in the face!” I obeyed. It was good advice. My opponent fell to the canvas, his nose bleeding, and didn’t beat the count. A knock-out ! “That’s my boy!” enthused the red-faced one, as my section cheered me from the ring. And not a mark on me! I felt elated. But I wasn’t stationed at Wilmslow for many weeks, and didn’t get called to the ring again.to represent my section. Just as well, probably.

One of my memories of RAF Bircham Newton (Norfolk) was becoming a projectionist at the camp cinema, assisting the civilian professional projectionist who drove in with the film reels. It wasn’t very difficult to follow his instructions, and sometimes he would even leave the entire evening to me, up in the projection box, where I would put on the show, and at the end , re-wind, manually, all the reels back to their beginnings.

The favourite records, discs, 78s, in 1946, were mostly American, on HMV labels — Harry James, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey, whose Opus One started my programme on the cinema’s turntable. Yes, I was the DJ as well, and as the personnel drifted into the show I would put on that Dorsey record, and my comrades would turn to look up and wave at me, seen through the glass window of the projection room. They were my own records, brought from home after returning from leave.

However, our behaviour during Docking evenings was not always exemplary, and when some glasses were broken outside the pub on a boisterous summer evening we cycled off back to the camp. Singing. No lights on the service bicycle, nor three-speed gears, either, for that matter. But I became aware that some way behind me was a large man on a bicycle. With a lamp. The village policeman ! Was he after me ? In those immediate post-war times servicemen still retained their popularity with the public, and I can’t ever recall there being any ‘trouble’ over bad behaviour to annoy the villagers.

I was 19, firm and fit. The constable was elderly and fat. I pedalled hard to get away. The constable stayed with me. And caught me up! “Excuse me, sir, but might I trouble you for your name and number -- your last three will suffice. There’s been a complaint from the landlord.!”

“There’s been a complaint from the police about you, Airman” said my Commanding Officer a couple of days later, as I stood to attention before him. “I have to remind you that the Royal Air Force takes complaints of misbehaviour by personnel off camp with great seriousness.”

I didn’t think that I’d done anything too awful, but the charge against me stuck, and I spent one week under ‘open arrest’ which involved reporting to the guard room for inspection in full and immaculate kit every hour, on the hour, outside work time. Tedious beyond words, backwards and forwards between billet and guard room,. Perpetual motion. Of course, that was the intention of the punishment.

That happened to me only on one other occasion at Bircham. During some sort of stand down the station was virtually deserted, all personnel away on leave except for a small holding party. I was one of them. Rather pleasant, nothing much to do. Just be there. Lying in each morning; attend the cookhouse for meals with the other members of the holding party -- rather better meals than usual -- a drink in the canteen after lunch, and settle down with a good book in a comfortable armchair afterwards. Being me I was soon having an afternoon ziz.

A rude awakening. The duty sergeant. “Didn’t you hear the Tannoy, Airman?” “What Tannoy, Sergeant ?” “The Tannoy summoning the duty petrol storekeeper to his duty, Airman!”

Now with the stand-down all aircraft were grounded, so who could want petrol? Answer: The Polish Army. At the vehicle pump station there awaited a column of a dozen great lorries, their officers sprawling on the grass. All smoking, naturally. They all stood up as I approached on my bicycle. “Put your cigarettes out, Gentlemen!” I ordered curtly, for the moment being in charge, throwing my weight about, although I hadn’t even the props of a LAC at the time. And I set to filling up their tanks. The system was that any branch of the services, British, Polish, allies, whatever, could call on any station for fuel which would be issued on submission of official vouchers. I signed for the documents for supply, the Polish officer signed my book for receipt. We saluted, shook hands, and off went the convoy.

‘Dereliction of Duty, Absent without Leave. Two of the various charges I faced. Once more before the C.O. He looked at my record.

“You are in trouble, Airman. I see you were involved in a drunken brawl in Docking recently! And now this!” I was dumbstruck. What next ? Firing squad ? The kindly sergeant accompanying the prisoner, intervened. “That was really just a very minor incident, Sir. Not serious..

“Very well, Flight sergeant. But this time it’s a very serious offence. Seven days under open arrest .. and do try to stay out of trouble, Airman!”

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